Archives de catégorie : History

THE DICTATORS de Iain Dale

Were the signs that Putin is a ruthless dictator there all along? How should we deal with President Xi of China? THE DICTATORS will contain 64 essays detailing the lives of some of the world’s infamous dictators, going back to 600BC up to the current day.

THE DICTATORS:
A Warning from History
by Iain Dale
Hodder & Stoughton, April 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

THE DICTATORS will feature essays on 60 of the most significant and notorious dictators from the 4th century BC to the present day. Unlike the subjects of the previous three books in this series, which were self-selecting, the decision about who to include will be subjective. It will be Iain’s personal choice, and he will include a mixture of ‘usual suspects’ and less familiar figures. The essays will be written by a range of academics, historians, commentators, political journalists and serving politicians. Each contributor will be carefully chosen. Most have either written about their subjects before or have a personal connection of some sort.
THE DICTATORS will be selected according to a defined set of criteria, and will include elected and unelected dictators, wartime and peacetime dictators, those driven by ideology and those with a reputation for sheer brutality. How did these tyrants, autocrats and despots seize power and how did they exercise it? Are there specific character traits that all dictators share? What can we learn from them in order to spot the warning signs in future?
By studying a wide variety of dictators in different parts of the world and throughout history, themes and patterns will inevitably emerge. The book is acutely relevant to world politics today.
As the subtitle states, it will serve as a warning from history.

Iain Dale is an accomplished broadcaster, presenting his own daily radio show on LBC, and several podcasts including the Iain Dale Book Club and The Presidents and Prime Ministers to accompany the Hodder books. He is a regular on CNN, Question Time, Newsnight, Good Morning Britain, the Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5, The Andrew Marr Show, Politics Live and a myriad of other political programmes too. He is a regular columnist for the Telegraph, Evening Standard and the ‘i’ newspaper and has a weekly column in the Eastern Daily Press and East Anglian Daily Times.

SCHATTENZEIT d’Oliver Hilmes

The brilliant new panorama of a historical year, by bestselling author Oliver Hilmes.

SCHATTENZEIT:
Deutschland 1943: Alltag und Abgründe
(Days of Darkness: Germany, 1943)
by Oliver Hilmes
Siedler/PRH Germany, January 2023

The catastrophe happens over coffee and cake: on a visit to his mother’s childhood friend in March 1943, Karlrobert Kreiten, a consummate 26-year-old pianist with a promising future ahead of him, claims that Germany has lost the war, and the Führer his mind. Six months after making these unguarded comments, he dies on the gallows.
Kreiten’s tragic fate is at the centre of « Days of Darkness », Oliver Hilmes’s superb account of life in Germany in 1943. That year, an entire army is wiped out at Stalingrad, and Goebbels calls for a ‘total war’; children are moved to the countryside for their safety, while millions of Germans crowd into cinemas to see the movie star Hans Albers as Baron Munchausen; the cities are already lying in ruins, yet people keep dancing; and while the Nazis’ ‘machinery of destruction’ is firing on all cylinders, some fantasise about the ‘final victory’ even as others try to stand up to the dictatorship.
In this brilliantly devised and meticulously researched kaleidoscope of stories and character portraits, Hilmes brings the dramatic events of 1943 back to life.

Oliver Hilmes, born in 1971, has a PhD in modern history and is curator at the Berlin Philharmonic foundation. He is the author of bestselling biographies of Alma Mahler-Werfel, Cosima Wagner, Franz Liszt and Ludwig II. His award-winning bestseller Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August was translated into numerous languages.

THE STRENGTH OF HOPE d’Abram Goldberg

One of the most uplifting stories you will ever read. Abram Goldberg is a beacon of joy and optimism, and a master of keeping perspective.

THE STRENGTH OF HOPE
by Abram Goldberg
with Fiona Harris
Affirm Press, September 2022
(via Kaplan/DeFiore Rights)

The day Abram and his mother arrived at Auschwitz death camp they both knew it would be her last. In their final moment together, Abram’s mum urged her nineteen-year-old son to ‘do everything humanly possible to survive, and tell people what happened here’. Then she was taken to a gas chamber and murdered. Abram had already endured and survived so much until that moment, but with his strength of hope, sometimes reduced to a flicker, he survived.
After liberation, Abram eventually found his way to Belgium, where he met the love of his life, fellow Auschwitz survivor Cesia. The young couple came to Australia, where that flicker of hope grew as bright as the sun, illuminating everything they touched and everyone who came into their sphere. Without bitterness and always with perspective, Abram has never forgotten his mother’s last words to him. And in their seventy-five years of marriage, Abram and Cesia have remained dedicated to educating people about the Holocaust and to living their lives to the fullest in tribute to its victims.
THE STRENGTH OF HOPE is full of wisdom, insight and daring, but at its heart it is a love story: for Cesia, for Australia and for life itself.

Abram Goldberg was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1924. Following the Nazi invasion, Abe and his parents were imprisoned in Łódź Ghetto. In 1944, Abe and his mother were sent to Auschwitz, where his mother was gassed upon arrival. Abe was sent to a series of camps before being liberated in 1945. Abe met his wife, Cesia, in 1946. They moved to Melbourne, Australia, in 1951, where they had two children and ran various restaurants including the iconic, Goldy’s. Abe has been volunteering at the Melbourn Holocaust Museum since 1984 and remains a member of the executive board. Abram was awarded an OAM in 2013.

BIG MEG de Tim & Emma Flannery

Professor Tim Flannery, and his daughter, Emma Flannery, bring the Megalodon to life in this fascinating and engaging natural history.

BIG MEG:
The Story of the Rise and Fall of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived
by Tim & Emma Flannery
Text Publishing, August 2023

Its name means giant tooth but everything about it is gigantic, including its pull on the human imagination. Tim and Emma Flannery’s BIG MEG will not only tell the story of the Megalodon, the Great Shark itself—what we know about where and how it lived, bred, hunted and died, a shark whose size and ferocity are the stuff of nightmares and whose teeth are probably the most sought after fossils in the world—but also how it continues to fascinate us.
The great shark, aka Otodus megalodon, the big meg, was the largest predator that ever stalked the planet weighing somewhere between fifty and 100 tonnes. We know that this leviathan was warm blooded, that it had the most powerful bite of any animal ever to have lived and that it could open that mighty jaw to a gape of three metres, wide enough to take a killer whale whole.
BIG MEG will be not only the biography of a phenomenal animal, but a compelling exploration of the role it plays in the popular imagination. The Megalodon might have been extinct for more than three million years but it flourishes in the stories we tell about it, in our hunt for its relics, and our quest to uncover more of the mystery surrounding it.

Tim Flannery is a scientist, an explorer, a conservationist and a leading writer on climate change. He has held various academic positions including visiting Professor in Evolutionary and Organismic Biology at Harvard University, Director of the South Australian Museum, Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum, Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, and Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability, Macquarie University. His books include the award-winning international bestseller The Weather Makers, Here on Earth, Atmosphere of Hope and Europe: The First 100 Million Years.

Emma Flannery is a scientist and writer. She has explored caves, forests and oceans across most of the globe’s continents in search of the elusive fossils, animals and plants. With postgraduate experience in geology, chemistry and palaeontology, Emma’s research and writing has been published in scientific journals, children’s books and a number of museum-based adult education tours. She has worked for and with universities, government agencies and museums.

NAZI BILLIONAIRES de David de Jong

A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it.

NAZI BILLIONAIRES:
The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
by David de Jong
‎ Mariner Books/HarperCollins, April 2022

In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his archrival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now.
In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how America’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.

“A provocative group portrait of five industrialists who expanded their fortunes by colluding with Hitler and then, after World War II, walked away with minimal punishment and barely a dent in their bottom lines… In this meticulously researched book, Mr. de Jong, an investigative journalist and former reporter at Bloomberg News, compels us to confront the current-day legacy of these Nazi ties. »—The Wall Street Journal

David de Jong is a journalist who previously covered European banking and finance from Amsterdam and hidden wealth and billionaire fortunes from New York for Bloomberg News. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Dutch Financial Daily. A native of the Netherlands, de Jong currently lives in Tel Aviv. He spent four years researching and writing this book from Berlin.